Product Description

From Publishers Weekly

Author, columnist and National Review founder Buckley offers a sentimental bildungsroman about a young man's initiation into the mid-century American conservative movement. In 1956, a 19-year-old Mormon missionary, Woodroe Raynor, is assigned to fieldwork in Austria, near the Hungarian border. He loses his virginity to a Hungarian woman and is wounded as he watches Russian tanks quell the Hungarian uprising. The bullet wound is nothing, however, compared to the psychic pain of learning that his paramour is a Communist sympathizer. Woodroe later attends Princeton and begins working for the John Birch Society. He has a love affair with an Ayn Rand acolyte, leading to some heady epistolary debates about whether Rand or Birch Society founder Robert Welch is better prepared to eradicate Communism. Rand is unmasked (yet again) as a sexually and intellectually manipulative egomaniac, and the wisdom of the National Review and its staff is affirmed regularly. Vivid historical passages about the Cuban missile crisis and the Kennedy assassination, as well as cameo appearances by John Dos Passos and Alan Greenspan, are a welcome diversion from the mostly stilted prose (a sex scene between Rand and a lover is described this way: "Today her lover was being welcomed with synaesthetical concern for all the senses.... But as he lay and later groaned with writhing and release, he brought the full force of his mind to transmuted, voluptarian elation in this physical union..."). Between the self-congratulatory tone and the flat characters, the novel will appeal primarily to Buckley's devoted fans.Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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This book really had an impact on my thinking. When in graduate school I was really taken with the objectivist school of thought. I fancied myself a libertarian, and thought that I was SO sophisticated. Really I had discovered a sure fire way to get A's on public policy papers by using a simple formula for virtually every problem. The argument is simply this: the government has a monopoly on the use of force; therefore the government is exceedingly dangerous. Free-markets operate without coercion. The end.As a younger conservative, I wasn't all that familiar with the John Birch crowd. Older teachers in the faculty room often accused me of being a "Bircher" because I was a conservative. This book introduced me to the more hysterical elements of anti-communism.So where does modern conservatism come from? It seems to me that this book is an allegory, not a history. It is no mistake that the former Objectivist and the former Bircher get married in the end, and he goes off to fight in Vietnam. In a way, this is exactly what happened to the conservative movement. Philosophically speaking, the modern conservative coalition is made up of social conservatives and libertarians, among others. This book is effective as an allegory showing this philosophical development. Artfully done!

Both critics and admirers of William F. Buckley credit him with sanitizing the Right. By writing many dissenting voices out of polite society, they say that Buckley made the modern respectable conservative movement possible. His fans will say that this was necessary to make the conservative message acceptable to the public and made the Reagan and Gingrich "revolutions" possible, while his foes will say that he kept the conservative movement from truly conserving anything. While Buckley also excommunicated libertarians, isolationists, and many other dissenters the two most famous cases were that of the John Birch Society and Ayn Rand.Buckley's latest novel, Getting It Right, takes a look at these two movements and implicitly shows why it was necessary for the excommunication of the Randians and Birchers. Getting It Right chronicles the ideological journeys of two young anti-communist lovers who met at the famous Sharon Summit where Young Americans for Freedom was founded. Leonora Goldstein was a young Randian who went to work as a secretary for Barbara Branden, and Woodroe Raynor who works for the John Birch Society and follows the eccentric General Ed Walker. Walker was a World War II hero who led the federal troops that forcibly integrated Little Rock. He was later forced out of the army for making speeches to troops in Germany that accused many major American politicians and media figures of being Communist. He then went on to protest the federal government's attempt to integrate Ole Miss.The two figures argue amongst each other showing flaws in both systems and they of course end up getting engaged as respectable National Review conservatives. Unfortunately, their intellectual odyssey to get there was largely uninteresting.Read more ›

In looking at the other reviews, they seem to come down a little heavy on the prose. I've never known historical fiction to be as flowing as well-written general fiction and don't expect it to be.Anyway, one of the best insights here was when Goldwater's aides were explaining to him the philosophy of Ayn Rand. The 'street' politics, as Buckley refers to them here, are nudged both directly and indirectly by these intellectual and fringe movements. Think Ayn Rand's high-brow philosophy had no effect on modern Republican thought? Guess again (also, see Greenspan). For me, it underscored how any standing "President" is truly just a figurehead for a broader movement when so many seem to overlook this and assume that he is where it all starts and ends......or "voting for the man", as I've heard it put. In other words, George Bush doesn't have to know the intricacies of everything that happens in relation to foreign policy because he's not basing decisions merely on his personal ideas anyway. That wasn't the point of the book, but an interesting aspect of it, I thought.

If you are far too into politics, as I am, you'll definitely enjoy this insight into the forces that determined the direction of the conservative movement in the last century.

Being from Utah, this book attracted my curiousity when the book jacket showed the main character, Woodroe was a Mormon. It is not too often that you see a name author choose to make someone of my faith the center of a story.I was disappointed that Mr. Buckley did not seem to conduct the level of research one would except from someone of his stature. The number of inacuracies about Mormons and Utah is surprising. Couldn't he get a NR intern to do some basic fact checking? Some things are minor like his mentioning the University of Salt Lake City which does not exist, or that Woodroe is from a town north of the Salt Lake. Look at a map, there are no towns on the north end of the Great Salt Lake.Most incredible are the situations he puts Woodroe in early in the book when he is serving as a missionary. LDS missionaries always work and travel in pairs, but Buckley totally ignores this basic tenant so he can get his main character into situations that would not happen to a normal missionary.Later in the book it turns out that Woodroe is not all that commited to his faith. Buckley could have developed his character better to show why this happened.I am not as familiar with the other institutions that he tackles in the book (The JBS and Ayn Rand) but if he was as sloppy in representing them as he was the Mormons than there is probably more fiction in this work than meets the eye.